Veterans: Leaving Small Businesses Out of Government Contracts Makes Country Less Safe

WASHINGTON, July 8 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ – “America’s veterans are heading to Capitol Hill to warn Congress that big business is keeping small business innovation out of military contracts, and it’s making our country less safe,” said Rick Weidman, Chair of VET-Force, who served as a medic in Vietnam.

Rep. Bob Filner, Chair of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, will convene a roundtable on July 9 at 9 a.m. in Room 345 of the Cannon House Office Building, to address the security issues raised in Breakdown, a National Security Crisis in a Small Business World, a report released last month by The Veterans Entrepreneurship Task Force (VET-Force – www.VET-Force.com).

Breakdown delineates how conflicting law and policy places our country at risk — economically and physically. Small business has long been the backbone of our country, but new U.S. trade policies and changes in how contracts are awarded have made it much more difficult for small companies to compete against and/or work with large defense contractors. In this tough economy, it is even more important to support our country’s small businesses.

“It has been U.S. policy for more than 70 years that the security of the United States is dependent on a strong and vibrant small business sector,” stated Weidman. “Since before World War II, Congress has clearly understood that small business was an indispensable element for the U.S. to have a competitive, innovative, and geographically diverse Federal procurement marketplace. When it comes to small business today, federal procurement is not competitive, innovative, or geographically diverse.”

According to Jim Wilfong, Chair of the VET-Force Small Business Policy Committee and a former U.S. Marine, “Our research has shown a major conflict between professed small business goals of the Congress and the Executive branch with our trade policy, the so-called ‘streamlining’ of government work over the last 15 years, and the creation of tens of billions of dollars in contract bundling. Contract bundling of this magnitude effectively ‘submarines’ the benefits of small business participation and creates a defense monopoly in contradiction with U.S. security policy.”

According to Breakdown, in 1978, Congress mandated that 23 percent of all government contracts go to small businesses. “The Federal Government is not even minimally making this target. The small business sector accounts for more than 50 percent of the Gross Domestic Product, and they can’t even get 23 percent of the Government contracts,” noted Wilfong.

“As veterans and patriots, we could not sit quietly by; we had to report what we have found to the American people,” said Lisa Wolford, a veteran of the Marine Corps and president of a Nebraska small business, CSSS, who will also be at the roundtable. “When the country’s security is being compromised, it is our responsibility to speak up.”

VET-Force, with over 2,500 veteran-owned small businesses, plus affiliated veterans organizations representing hundreds of thousands of individual veterans, advocates for the support of America’s service-disabled and other veteran-owned entrepreneurial enterprises as one way for veterans to provide economic security and prosperity to their families and for the communities they live in. Breakdown, a National Security Crisis in a Small Business World is available at www.vet-force.org

SOURCE VET-Force